1083 5th Ave, New York, New York 10128, United States
National Academy Museum and School.
1083 5th Ave, New York, New York 10128, United States
National Academy Museum and School.
Ryder was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, United States, on March 19, 1847. In those years New Bedford was the world's largest whaling port. Ryder's ancestors on both his mother's and father's sides were of old Cape Cod families. Many of them had been sailors. Son of Alexander Gage Ryder and Elizabeth (Cobb) Ryder, he was the youngest of four sons.
Albert Ryder's education went no further than grammar school, as his eyes were oversensitive. Without professional training he began to paint landscape outdoors while still in New Bedford. When he was in his early twenties, his family moved to New York City to join Ryder's elder brother, who managed a successful restaurant as well as the Hotel Albert. There the artist lived the rest of his life.
Ryder put in an application to the National Academy of Design (later National Academy Museum and School), however, it was rejected. He then started his lessons with the famous painter William Edgar Marshall, who was a former pupil of Thomas Couture. After his training, his application to the Academy was eventually accepted, and he began his studies in 1870. There he met the artist Julian Alden Weir in 1873, who became his lifelong friend. That same year Albert Ryder exhibited his work for the first time.
Ryder's early paintings were mostly landscapes, they usually included horses, cows, and sheep. Small in size and quite naturalistic in style, his artworks were marked by particularly personal form and color. After having their work rejected several times for the National Academy exhibition, in 1875 Albert Ryder along with John La Farge and William Morris Hunt decided to set up on their own. It was sponsored by the English interior design firm Cottier & Company and Daniel Cottier.
Albert Ryder's first trip to Europe took place in 1877, when he spent a month in London. There he studied the artworks of the French Barbizon School and also visited the Netherlands where he knew about the Dutch Hague School, which appealed to him. When he returned, Ryder became a founder of the Society of American Artists, a group that felt the National Academy was too academic and conservative. His initiative was supported by Julian Alden Weir, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Robert Swain Gifford, and John La Farge. The painter exhibited with his group between 1878 and 1887.
His next and longest trip was in the summer of 1882. Then Albert Ryder visited France, Spain, Italy, Tangier and Switzerland. In 1887 and 1896 he discovered the Atlantic, spending those years in the sea voyages, living in London only 2 weeks each time.
His greatest works were based on the Bible, classical mythology, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and inspired by the 19th-century romantics such as Lord Byron, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Thomas Campbell and Edgar Allan Poe. Two of his major paintings were influenced by Richard Wagner's operas. The works of the period were not just illustrations but original works of art. Nature always played a crucial part. But his major ideas were much more than simple nature poems; their central leitmotif was the human being in relation to superhuman powers. Albert Ryder used the elements of nature far more freely than any contemporary painter of America.
Ryder worked long over his pictures, building them in layer on layer of pigment, often keeping them for years, so that his total production numbers only about 165 paintings. Unfortunately he had no sound technical knowledge, and many of his pictures have deteriorated to some extent. Because of the small number of his works and their increasing value, forgeries began to appear in his last years; and after his death the production increased until there are now about five times as many fakes as genuine works.
After the year 1900, Albert Ryder didn't produce new artworks, he spent most of his time re-working his old paintings that were piled in his rooms. Those paintings had cracked or darkened over time, and Ryder tried to restore them, in most cases his attempts were unsuccessful. However, ten of his pictures were included in the 1913 New York Armory Show. After his health began to fail in 1915, Ryder lived with friends in Elmhurst, Long Island.
Albert Ryder was one of the most puzzling figures in the history of American art. While the works of many of Ryder's contemporaries were partly or mostly forgotten through much of the 20th century, Ryder's artistic reputation has remained largely intact owing to his unique and forward-looking style.
Although he produced only 165 paintings, his works were frequently faked. He had a powerful influence on his contemporary Ryder include Marsden Hartley, who befriended him, Rockwell Kent, Walt Kuhn and Jackson Pollock.
A year after his death, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York staged a memorial exhibition in his honor.
Lord Ullin's Daughter
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
Pegasus Departing
Dancing Dryads
The Tempest
King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid
Landscape
Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens
Jonah
Moonlit Cove
Perrette
Moonlight
The Pond
Spirit of Autumn
Landscape with Trees and Cattle
The Farmyard
The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse)
Lorelei
A Country Girl
In the Stable
The Barnyard
Mother and Child
The Old Mill by Moonlight
Flying Dutchman
Pond in Moonlight
At the Ford
Roadside Meeting
Fulton Chain from Bald Mountain
Journey's End
Figure in a surrealist landscape
Landscape of woman and child
Ryder's art was fundamentally religious. He was one of the few artists of his time to whom religion was not mere conformity but intense, profound belief.
Quotations:
"The artist should strive to express his thought and not the surface of it."
"The artist should fear to become the slave of detail."
"Imitation is not inspiration, and inspiration only can give birth to a work of art. The least of man's original emanations is better that the best of a borrowed thought."
"Modern art must strike out from the old. The new is not revealed to those whose eyes are fastened in worship upon the old."
"The artist has only to remain true to his dream and it will possess his work in such a manner that it will resemble the work of no other man."
"Have you ever seen an inch worm crawl up a leaf or twig, and then clinging to the very end, revolve in the air, feeling for something to reach...? That's like me. I am trying to find something out there beyond the place on which I have a footing."
"A rain-tight roof, frugal living, a box of colors, and God's sunlight through clear windows keep the soul attuned and the body vigorous for one's daily work."
"The artist needs but a roof, a crust of bread, and his easel, and all the rest God gives him in abundance. He must live to paint and not paint to live."
"No two visions are alike. Those who reach the heights have all toiled up the steep mountains by a different route. To each has been revealed a different panorama."
Albert Ryder was a member of the Society of American Artists in 1878 and became its Academician in 1906.
Albert Ryder was a misanthrope. He didn't care much about world affairs, money, or his own artistic reputation. He was utterly unable to cope with housekeeping, and the two rooms in which he lived were in a condition of incredible disorder, piled waist-high with all kinds of objects.
Quotes from others about the person
1917 obituary in the New York Times: "[Albert Ryder] was one of the most interesting artists America has ever produced... Every picture that he painted was the result of years of reflection and experiment."
Robert Hughes: "[Albert Ryder is] as an emblem of aesthetic purity, a holy sage, and the native prophet who linked tradition to modernism."
Albert Ryder never married, and there is no evidence of his involvement in any significant romantic relationships with women.
